


she won't let me in there

by unfinishedidea



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:05:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfinishedidea/pseuds/unfinishedidea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a stupid mistake, Cassie knows. It’s a stupid mistake, but Nick doesn’t let it go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she won't let me in there

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YappiChick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YappiChick/gifts).



> This story was a delight to write, and I can only hope I did your request justice, YappiChick. I hope you like it!
> 
> Thank you to Care for cheerleading and being generally awesome. Title is from [I See My Mother](http://anonym.to/?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKG7uf4RV-Q) by POLIÇA.

It’s a stupid mistake, Cassie knows. It’s a stupid mistake, but Nick doesn’t let it go.

She’s sixteen. Her hands are calloused, rough, scarred; she’s killed men with these hands. She’s almost died. She’s traveled through cities, provinces, countries, on foot at times, tired and half-delirious from hunger.

She misses her mother.

It’s been three years since Division captured her, and they’re no closer to bringing Division down, to finding out where they keep her, to saving her. The disappointment’s familiar now, like a well-worn sweater, the ache in her chest almost comfortable in its persistence.

She tries to watch her mother, but all there is is darkness, a terrible gaping emptiness that leaves her hollow, numb. Every time she tries she gets headaches like hangovers, headaches that last for days.

Frustration flashes through her; she frowns and tries again, focuses on her mother, and then Nick says, “Holy shit, Cassie,” and she blinks her eyes open and looks at him. His eyes are wide and he’s up and across the room, grabbing tissues from the small bedside table.

She looks down and there’s blood on her fingers. Nick reaches up with the tissues and gently pats under her nose. She swats him away a moment later, takes the tissues from him.

They’re in a rundown hostel in Barcelona, paint peeling along the windowsill. Cities are safer. There’s more people, more noise, more distractions. 

The headache has already started, and she pinches the bridge of her nose with one hand, her other still holding up the tissues. Each pulse makes her angrier; it builds in bursts, feeds on the knot of helplessness in her heart.

“I’m going to take a walk,” Cassie says.

“Cassie,” Nick says, but she’s already out the door.

_If you had even a modicum of your mother’s talent._

It’s hot. Late afternoon, and Cassie pushes through the crowd, ignoring the people that she bumps into. She lets her hair fall over her face, obscuring. She has green highlights now, bright like the sea. Her eyes burn. She wipes away the tears and her hand comes away with smudged mascara. She doesn’t pay attention to where she’s walking, visions flashing through her mind; a worn down silver car on a lit city street, stacks of old books in a deserted dim room, blood spattered on a white wall. She’s better now about filtering out the useless noise, but sometimes they still bleed through, when her control slips.

After a few minutes, she abruptly realizes she’s being followed. She’s wandered into a narrow alley, alone, shadowed by the tall walls.

She turns without warning and knees one of the unassumingly dressed men in the balls, but there’s four of them and they’ve taken her by surprise. Stupid, stupid, careless.

One of them grabs her wrist, jerks it around her back. “Well you’re certainly feisty,” he says, voice rounded with an English accent, “but not feisty enough. Where’s your guard dog?” A moment later the pressure relaxes and she hears the sound of flesh hitting a wall, like a punchline.

The other three men immediately try to run, but Nick moves them, knocks them all unconscious. The whole encounter takes less than a minute.

Nick hugs her close, tucks her head against his chest. She’s sixteen, and some days she feels world-weary, but right now she is tired, the adrenaline draining away, and she is scared, and she is sixteen.

“I leave you for five minutes,” Nick says, lightly, but his heart is pounding, rabbit-fast.

\\\

They don’t talk about it until they’re on the train, headed for Paris, and then to Brussels, up through Hamburg and then on to Copenhagen.

“You’re old enough to get into trouble, now,” Nick says.

Cassie raises both her eyebrows.

“Oh, am I now?”

Nick rolls his eyes.

“I stand corrected: you’re old enough to get into trouble that I won’t be able to get you out of. I will concede that you’ve been a royal pain in my ass since I’ve met you—”

“I’m blown away by your generosity,” Cassie says. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

He continues as if didn’t hear her, but he raises his voice. “—and your luck borders on preternatural, but. You can’t always rely on that. Or me.”

“You were there today. My knight, et cetera, et cetera,” she says.

“Cassie.”

“It was one stupid mistake, all right? I promise I won’t wander around unawares and alone again,” she says. 

“Cassie,” Nick says again, quiet, and she looks over at him, surprised. They trade affection in sarcasm and facetiousness, but he’s serious now.

“Okay,” she says, after a moment.

It’s his turn to raise his eyebrows.

“What, that was it? No argument? I didn’t even offer the terms yet. You should have warned me; I didn’t expect the end of the world to come so soon. I haven’t cashed out all my stock options.”

She punches him in the arm, and he makes a face.

“You’re going to say I have to do something stupid that I probably won’t like, and then I’ll get pissed at you and stomp off in a glorious teenage tantrum, and then eventually I’ll give in, so let’s just cut out the boring parts. Too much work.” 

“I hope you’re not going to make it this easy every time,” Nick says.

She snorts. “Dream on, Gant.”

She falls asleep on his shoulder as they cross the border between France and Belgium. Nick smells good, familiar, like cheap motel shampoo and deodorant. It’s disarming.

She knows that she’s young, full of hormones—it’s nothing, it’s a silly infatuation cultivated from forced proximity, she has daddy issues, she has hero worship, it’s illicit and therefore attractive, etc., ad nauseam.

She doesn’t have the time for it, but sometimes she lets it settle, lets herself forget that they’re on the run, homeless, adrift, fighting what feels like a losing battle. She lets herself pretend to be a normal sixteen year old.

Nick wraps an arm around her and lets her sleep.

\\\

They have a ritual.

“So what’s it going to be today?” Nick asks as he eats a sausage from a street food stall. They’re in Hamburg on the last leg of their trip, waiting for the train.

“Hmm,” Cassie says. She closes her eyes and puts her fingers against her temples, like a roadside fortune teller.

“Flesh-eating bacteria. _Necrotizing fasciitis._ We get infected in a lab and it slowly eats away at our skins until we’re nothing but eyeballs,” Cassie says, then goes back to absently scrolling down the page on the Louvre on the cheap internet cafe computer. She’s never been, but she saw it in a vision. 

Nick stares at her, sausage halfway to his mouth.

“Oookay, that’s not horrifying at all. I think that’s enough Wikipedia for you today, young lady.”

“Hey, at least we’re not zombies this time.”

“Joy,” Nick says drily.

\\\

Cassie thinks they’ll stay in Copenhagen for a while, but when they get there, Nick buys more tickets, and they end up on a ferry to Oslo.

She’s never been to Norway before. It’s like another world. Cassie hasn’t asked him what they’re doing here, what this entire trip has been about. It’s not near any Division headquarters, any points of interests. They finally stop at a tiny bed and breakfast in the curve of a fjord, owned by an elderly lesbian couple. They greet Nick warmly and he hands them the small potted plant he’d picked up in the town center.

“Cassie, this is Marit and Arla. Marit’s a Shadow and Arla’s a Stitch. They helped me when I was in a bit of trouble some years back.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Cassie says.

“What a lovely child,” Arla says.

“What are you doing with this old bastard?” Marit says.

“He’s not so bad,” Cassie says.

\\\

“Okay, time to start your training,” Nick says when they’ve settled in, after being fed the first home-cooked meal Cassie’s had since—in a long time.

“My what?” Cassie says.

\\\

“You’re going to teach me,” she says. It’s more incredulous than she means it to be.

“Hey,” he says. “Who saved your ass in Barcelona?”

“Who saved _your_ ass in Hong Kong?” Cassie retorts.

“Technically, that was your mom,” Nick says, before his face blanks.

“And technicalities are the only way you’re ever going to win,” Cassie says, ignoring the twinge. “Also, how are you supposed to teach me when, you know, I’m not a Mover?”

“Fine, if you’re so skeptical of my non-superpower prowess,” Nick says. “Come at me.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Come on,” Nick says.

“Okay,” she says, “you asked for it.”

It’s not elegant, but she manages to get a jab into his sternum and kick to the shins before he pins her to his chest.

“Seriously?” Nick says, after letting her go, “You hit like a girl.”

“I am a girl, in case the, you know,” she flaps both her hands to emphasize, “breasts didn’t give it away. Don’t be a dick.”

“You hit like a thirteen-year-old.”

“Still being a dick.”

\\\

“Again,” Nick says, after what feels like the hundredth time.

“Oh, fuck you,” Cassie snaps.

“Seeing the future can’t protect you against everything,” Nick says.

“And this fumbling is supposed to?”

“I’m just warming you up; this is pregaming before the real party gets here.”

“Yes, let’s make drinking metaphors to the underage teen,” Cassie says.

“I’ll admit that wasn’t my best.”

\\\

Cassie’s meditating outside by the river when she hears him.

Hook grabs her in a bear hug, laughs as she hugs him back, tight.

“It’s been too long,” he says, and the five of them, a strange motley crew, have a lively, light brunch.

Afterwards, Nick drags Cassie back outside, Hook following behind them, and Nick clasps Hook by the shoulder.

“Hook taught me all I know about being a badass.”

Hook snorts. “That statement is absurd on so many levels, first and foremost being that you’re nothing even resembling a badass, but it also contains the fallacy that you have the ability to learn, which you are pathologically incapable of,” Hook says.

“Hey,” Nick says.

\\\

Hook knows all the dirty tricks.

“Go for the eyes, when you can,” he says, making a stabbing motion with his index and middle finger. “This isn’t a duel, or a fair fight. Hit the soft, fleshy parts. It’s instinctive to go for the balls, but that isn’t as big an area as any man would like to think.”

He gently and quickly fixes her form, gives her tips.

“You’ll have the disadvantage of being smaller, but you have a lower center of gravity, which is more useful than people give it credit for,” Hook says. “It’ll be harder to unbalance you. Stay steady, aim low.”

She runs drills with him and Nick, every day, after she meditates in the morning, and draws her visions. They’re aimless at the moment, but she works on fine-tuning them every day, practices on mundane things; they seem to come to her easier, out here in the quiet.

Hook teaches her the weaknesses of the human body, over and over until it becomes second nature.

The days turn into weeks into months, and it’s not her home, but it’s a home, an escape, paradise. Marit and Arla adopt her in all but name, cluck over her petiteness, chastise Nick when he teases her, and always side with her in an argument.

It opens up something deep inside of her, yearning, and she almost wants to tell Nick that she doesn’t want to do it anymore, she just wants to stay here, safe, cut off from the rest of the world.

\\\

Hook gets word that a friend, a fellow defected Division agent, is captured, killed, and the illusion shatters.

\\\

Nick and Cassie build a reputation for themselves.

They’ve been off the grid for so long that Division isn’t expecting them, and in any case, Cassie’s skills are honed, now, sharp enough to cut; they hit Paris, Venice, Ankara, Cairo, lightning fast. They leave Division reeling.

It doesn’t last, not that she expected it to.

She wakes up abruptly; they’re on the outskirts of Rio. It’s hot, humid, her shirt sticking to her uncomfortably. Someone’s above her; she goes for their throat.

“It’s me, Cassie, it’s me!” Nick hisses, barely deflecting her attack. “Division’s here, right now, we have to move,” but something feels off.

“Nick,” she says, but Nick pushes her out the door, and they run through the darkness, but there are lights, everywhere, men shouting, the sound of metal.

“I’ll draw them off, go,” Nick says, veering off into the thick of the light.

“Nick!” she yells, and tries to follow, but she hits a wall of air. She snarls in frustration. Nick whirls around; he looks frantic.

“Cassie, now is not the time to argue, _go_!”

\\\

She waits in an abandoned warehouse in Mexico City, a predetermined meeting point for if they ever got separated, an entire day and night, day and night, but he doesn’t show up.

They have him.

She doesn’t know what to do.

\\\

She goes home.

She hasn't been back to the States since her mother disappeared. She wishes Emily were here, but Emily was never as nomadic as the rest of them, is still halfway around the world.

She sends an encrypted, coded email to a secret address, emergencies only. She gets a response within five minutes.

Cassie hasn’t seen Kira in years. Kira pitches her voice lower, now; her sentences are clipped, hard. She carries a gun she doesn’t use, dresses in a crisp suit. She pushes as instinctively as she breathes, and Cassie thinks that some of it bleeds into herself. It’s been five years since she killed Carver, since Carver pushed her, and even though Kira twisted it into a useful undercover backstory, Cassie thinks that some of it lingered, some of the lies. Like a vivid dream she couldn’t shake off.

“I wouldn’t normally jeopardize your cover,” Cassie says.

“Nick,” Kira says.

“They took him,” Cassie says.

Kira nods once.

“I don’t know what to do,” Cassie says. “It—it happened so fast.”

“It wasn’t us. I would’ve heard. You two have built quite the name for yourselves.” Kira’s mouth quirks.

“I didn’t think so,” Cassie says. “Something was off.”

“There’s others looking for you now, with such a large price on your head,” Kira says. She rummages around her bag, tosses Cassie a small, worn silver key.

“Temporary safe house,” Kira says, and writes down an address. “Let me know if you see anything; in the meantime, I’ll do some digging.”

Cassie has never liked Kira. She says, “Thank you,” and means it.

\\\ 

She breathes deep and focuses on Nick and it’s just like with her mother. She feels the panic welling up inside her, a knot in her chest that rises up to her throat.

 _Steady_ , she tells herself. _Steady_.

\\\

The building’s heavily guarded, but Cassie is light on her feet, deadly and silent.

There’s a meathead of a man standing guard at the entrance to a nondescript hallway, bald, with another similarly built man next to him. The guy on the left has a star tattooed to the side of his head; his friend has two long vertical scars across his cheeks.

“It’s her,” tattoo head hisses, and scar cheeks pulls out two long serrated knives.

“Heard of me, have you?” she asks mildly. “I hope you didn’t give yourself those scars,” she continues, nodding towards the knives. “Clumsy.”

Scar cheeks bares his teeth and lunges; she dodges easily, stomps on his instep and snaps his head back with the flat of her elbow and forearm. He stumbles back.

“Weren't expecting that, were you," Cassie says. "I don't just live in my head."

They think Nick’s the muscle, but no one who’s ever seen her fight has lived to spread the word.

\\\

It’s quick.

She leaves their bodies limp on the floor, runs down the hallway, looking wildly around until she sees it; a latch hidden in an alcove.

The room is musty, dark; she fumbles for the bare light bulb.

“What are you doing here?” Nick asks hoarsely. He’s slumped over, held up on his knees by the chains that his wrists are bound in, looped from the ceiling.

“That’s a particularly stupid question, even for you,” she says.

“It’s a trap,” he says, “you have to get out of here, I can’t—”

“You’re a complete idiot,” she says.

He’s weak from the drugs. Cassie carries him out easily. She’s not thirteen anymore, or sixteen, even, insecure, scared, lost.

\\\

It’s a quiet, remote basement in a tucked away rural city. Kira says they can stay there as long as they need.

Nick is pale, unmoving; he doesn’t look much better asleep.

Cassie lifts her hand, hesitates, then brushes some stray hairs away from his forehead. He shifts, blinks his eyes open, leans into the hand that she’s cupped around his cheek.

“Does this mean you’re John McClane and I’m Holly Gennaro? You’re shattering my sense of self; I always thought I’d be McClane.” His voice is low, hoarse.

“I can gag you,” Cassie says, feeling light-headed from the relief. She sits down.

“Kinky,” Nick says, “But I guess I totally expected that.”

The surprise must show on her face; Nick quirks his mouth.

“I thought you knew,” he says.

“I thought _you_ knew, and were ignoring it.”

“I was waiting for you. I was trying to be subtle.”

“There’s subtle and then there’s oblivious.”

“Sorry,” Nick says. “Also you were underage.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be consumed with angst and tortured slash conflicted about taking advantage of a vulnerable girl who’s over ten years your junior?”

“Yes. Taking advantage. Terribly tortured.”

She flicks his ear lightly and he frowns at her, mock serious. “Now who’s taking advantage? I’ll have you know I’m wounded and maimed.” He looks around.

“Kira. She’s letting us stay here.” She can’t quite keep the edge out of her voice.

“You’re jealous,” Nick says. It’s not a question.

“I’m not jealous.”

“Mhmm. Don’t worry, you’re my favorite,” Nick says. It’s uncomfortably honest, and Cassie flushes.

“How’d you find me?” Nick asks, thankfully changing the subject, and Cassie shows him the drawing, the white towering walls. She doesn't tell him about the headaches, the nosebleeds, how it took her a week to even get a shadow of an image.

“You know, you’d think your drawings would get better over time, but,” Nick says. “that’s pretty much as hideous as the first drawing you showed me. It’s quite a talent.” 

She holds her fingers threateningly over his ear, and he says, “And by hideous I mean...alluring. Mysterious? Could be the centerpiece to an exhibit at MoMA.” He captures her menacing hand, presses her fingers against his mouth.

She draws back after a moment.

“You really don’t think this is a terrible idea?” Cassie asks.

“I don’t know, is it?” Nick says, words slurring as he drifts back into sleep.

She crawls into the bed with him, arranges herself carefully around his bruised body, slips her hand into his hand. He stirs, briefly, and his grip is firm, steady, before it relaxes again.

She remembers something that she hasn’t thought of in years, from before she even knew what Watching was.

She’d dream of things she was too young to understand. There was a particularly bad one; she’d woken up crying, calling out, though she can barely remember what it was now.

Her mother had hushed her, curled around her small body, warm and soft and smelling of oranges and old books.

“It’s all right,” her mother had said. “Everything will be all right.”


End file.
